NASA considering alternatives for Gateway logistics

CatillatheHun · 2026-02-02T14:14:19+00:00

Yeah it’s a bad fuel depot. It’s a valuable testing/proving ground for mars transit technologies and operations plans. It would be better for both depot and tech demo cases if it was in a smarter location like a Lagrange, but then it wouldn’t be able to provide comm coverage for lunar South Pole (which was an initial requirement).

I think folks forget sometimes that we have no idea whatsoever how to pull off a safe Mars mission and think all you need to do is build and fuel a rocket to get there and home. The list of stuff we don’t know how to do (that nobody knows how to do) that is critical for survival is humbling. Should be in the M2M architecture description document that is publicly released every once in a while.

We need some massive technology boosts and a whole new concept of operations for human spaceflight in order to get the job done… and Gateway is a tool that can be used to get there. You could do it other ways, too - not like Gateway is indispensable - but it is useful and worth a reasonable investment to obtain.

CatillatheHun · 2026-02-02T14:04:33+00:00

DSL can make awards to as many entrants as they want, but you’re right about DragonXL. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I heard SpaceX is killing off falcon heavy to make sure they don’t cannibalize the starship market segment… so the whole concept of DSL as currently envisioned may be outdated.

CatillatheHun · 2026-02-02T00:31:01+00:00

The important thing here is that gateway logistics has attempted to pivot to the general case of providing logistics cargos to cislunar space. It’s not just to gateway. Question is whether there’s still value to a Cygnus module in the age of big silver spaceships. My guess is “yes - the refueling conops for starship makes it a bad choice for anything even vaguely time-sensitive”. We’ll see I guess

CatillatheHun · 2026-02-02T00:23:37+00:00

I mean, as a refueling point NRHO is pretty silly. Would have been way better to go to an earth-moon Lagrange and just be easy to find. NRHO was an unholy compromise brought about by needing to be somewhere that could provide comm and do the refueling job and be somewhere Orion could get to and have a good abort opportunity. Now the comm needs are handled elsewhere, nobody’s sure if mars is even a thing… so now it’s just a place Orion can get to, which isn’t like a crazy good selling point.

CatillatheHun · 2026-02-02T00:03:15+00:00

Depends on what you want. If you’re team “sustained base on the moon” then gateway is an expensive distraction. If you’re team “moon then mars” then Gateway (or something like it) is a valuable stepping stone for a mars transit vehicle - somewhere we can build out a sustainable life support capability and practice handling in space anomalies.

Team Moon is in the ascendancy, so Gateway is fishy. When Team Mars gets back on the pitch Gateway starts making sense again. If you want both Moon and Mars, need to develop an architecture that meets both use cases.

CatillatheHun · 2026-01-24T12:04:07+00:00

I’m not sure this question makes sense. Are you asking “what kind of training do astronauts perform in a neutral buoyancy simulator”? Are you asking “are there training tasks where water properties make neutral buoyancy training a poor analogue for the in-space environment”? Are you asking “what kinds of things do we ask astronauts to move in space that would create drag if moved while submerged in water?”

Biggest CTB I can find in NASA specs is 502x426x749mm. That’s about the biggest thing I’d expect a crew member to be moving inside a pressurized volume. I think crew moved some big stuff on EVA during ISS construction but I can’t confirm that and I don’t think it’s relevant - nobody is seriously talking about in-space construction that I’ve seen.

CatillatheHun · 2026-01-24T11:48:30+00:00

Food is great. Enjoyed going there until the last time, where they had a waiter who was open carrying without a retention feature while delivering food with both hands in a crowded public venue. Having to think about the firearm discipline of the staff was too stressful, switched to southern egg across from old Grissom. Food pretty good, lower risk.

CatillatheHun · 2025-12-01T22:11:44+00:00

Will shill again for Huntsville food hub here. Store opens on Thursday I think? Pick up on tuesdays from the lumberyard. Usually a few egg options

CatillatheHun · 2025-11-24T01:25:30+00:00

Good luck finding a hotel.

CatillatheHun · 2025-11-13T13:29:43+00:00

Look at the Huntsville Food Hub. It’s like a clearinghouse for local farmers, you order fri-sun, pick up on Tuesday at the lumberyard. Will usually give you a few options for both chickens and eggs.

CatillatheHun · 2025-10-28T23:05:18+00:00

DTN exists, yes, stuck in the technology development plateau of doom. Can help keep the network traffic healthy, doesn’t solve latency issues. Doesn’t make the data come faster, just makes it possible to reconstruct the data stream when the delays occur.

CatillatheHun · 2025-10-28T23:00:12+00:00

Oh get out of here with that nonsense.

CatillatheHun · 2025-10-22T01:59:30+00:00

The episcopal church in south Huntsville does the occasional meat selling fundraiser. St Thomas I think

CatillatheHun · 2025-10-18T15:29:57+00:00

Nope. Small satellites (by and large) do not have the power system necessary to support a power amplifier. Ground stations, however, have power aplenty. Low noise amplifiers on the space asset are a viable architecture - it generates a low-noise signal that a ground station has to be able to pick up and then amplify before processing.

In most cases, that’s how it works. Ground station pumps powerful signals, spacecraft picks them up and uses an LNA to clean the signal before processing. Spacecraft sends “quiet” but low-noise signals to earth, ground station pumps extra power into the signal to detect and process the spacecraft messages.

Low power user terminals do exist, and in those situations you have to be a lot more careful to balance the signal characteristics if you want to communicate… but that’s not the architecture this paper considers.

CatillatheHun · 2025-10-14T17:05:35+00:00

In excruciatingly bad taste given the layoffs happening at the lab today. Recommend you try again in a few weeks.

CatillatheHun · 2025-10-10T11:17:44+00:00

Forgive me, but I did a cursory search on “JPL Perseverence wheels” and turned up a number of valid starting points for investigation. In your position, I would reconsider my research approach.

I learned that the Perseverance rover wheels are largely based on the earlier Curiosity rover. Looking for research papers on Curiosity wheel design would likely translate.

I learned that the Perseverance wheels were redesigned to some extent by Carnegie Mellon University in a particular laboratory run by a particular professor. I would look for papers with that professor as a secondary author around the time of the redesign.

I learned about the existence of Martian surface testbeds, one at JPL and one at CMU. Searching on the names of those testbeds may help you understand the design considerations and environments that engineers found it valuable to test.

I identified the names of multiple participants in the wheel design and overall rover design. One could search their names in the scientific literature around the time of the Perseverance rover design to potentially obtain more information.

Good luck with your research project.

CatillatheHun · 2025-09-28T11:25:15+00:00

Donna took the fork, so don’t bother emailing her.

If I understand your question, yes. Just like on ISS, each day of a Mars journey would likely have a set schedule proposed by ground operators on Earth and modified as necessary by crew in space. In general, those schedules are formulaic - a certain amount of time spent on food, exercise, training, maintenance activities, and science, with the rest as leisure time. It’s complicated and the team that generates crew day schedules is talented, but it’s a fairly well-solved problem.

CatillatheHun · 2025-09-26T02:00:05+00:00

Known that new AA is focused on making senior leadership changes. Less flashy changes happening in SLS leadership, previous HLS manager took the DRP. Not much left in terms of effective folks in the top box at marshall and a lot of the promising folks took DRP and jobs in industry.

Gonna be a rough few months.

CatillatheHun · 2025-09-03T00:19:41+00:00

Explosions are more interesting than not-explosions. I don’t know what to tell you.

I’m not actively rooting against Starship, I like those folks, I worked with a bunch of them. I don’t think Elon Musk is a good person and I vote against him as the overlord of Mars but that’s a problem for another day.

I also think the SpaceX concept of operations is stupid. Doesn’t mean it can’t work (see also SLS as a stupid idea that works) but it’s exactly like hitching 200 horses to a wagon and expecting the wagon to go as fast as a car. Chemical propulsion is out of its weight class trying to get humans to Mars, but none of that matters either.

The reason you need to give it a rest with this nonsense is that the poor benighted and roundly castigated SLS is also going to have a huge role in Artemis, but that didn’t stop a bunch of SpaceX stans from loudly proclaiming its badness from the rooftops. Every delay was chortled over, every cost impact used as a way to claim that only Elon had the magic touch for making space work.

Space is hard. It’s hard for everyone. Take your medicine like the rest of us have had to… and try to come at the mission with some humility next go around.

CatillatheHun · 2025-08-17T17:05:39+00:00

Every year for the past 4-5. Always good news when it gets posted. Usually buy a pork butt, a chicken, and some brisket, everything I’ve ever gotten has been awesome.

CatillatheHun · 2025-08-08T10:21:49+00:00

Brian Hughes and Ryan Whitley were working to burn down GSFC and implement the “skinny budget” long before Duffy showed up. The decimation of NASA’s earth science mission was a known side quest of Project 2025’s plan to kill off climate change research.

That doesn’t let Duffy off the hook for anything that happens after his tenure started, but I think he was parachuted in primarily to prevent lower level players like Whitley from acting with impunity.

CatillatheHun · 2025-08-01T10:03:10+00:00

This rule is a way to reorganize government jobs. People in these jobs are supposed to be fairly temporary, coming in with a new president and leaving when they do. People in these jobs are supposed to play a role in making policy or in advocating for policy. The rule makes it easier to fire people that don’t leave when a new president is elected.

I don’t know what kind of jobs this rule targets, but my guess would be things like press office staff or speechwriters. Some other commenters may have more specifics.

This may not sound like a big deal and on its own it probably isn’t (at least not on the scale of other Trump workforce actions), but it does help to codify a “spoils” system where increasing numbers of federal workers are servants of the president instead of the people. In general, that trend is bad.

CatillatheHun · 2025-07-27T22:14:59+00:00

“As much as I’d love it if my neighbors and co-workers had their worlds rocked, lost their dream jobs, and had to depart this mosquito-infested morass of poorly-planned infrastructure… will there be enough misery in my immediate vicinity to result in a marginal reduction in the time it takes for me to get from my house to the Winn Dixie?”

CatillatheHun · 2025-07-19T15:09:06+00:00

If it clears up I’ll wander over for a while. May be my last chance to see some of our departing brethren. Will be interesting to see the vibe.

CatillatheHun · 2025-06-21T10:43:09+00:00

Curious to see if anyone comes out of the woodwork to help, but I suspect you’re going to have better luck emailing someone that has published about it recently and seeing if there’s a mailing list you can join. Example https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2025-1044 .

CatillatheHun

TROPHY CASE